Case Publishing

Takashi Homma's "Symphony - mushrooms from the forest" has been shortlisted for the 2020 Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. On the occasion of the good news, we are sharing the insight into his works from the talk by Homma and Kotaro Iizawa (Photo Critic) held back in February 2020.

 

―― Today’s conversation between Takashi Homma and Kotaro Iizawa takes place on occasion of the publication of Homma’s photobook “Symphony – Mushrooms from the Forest,” released at the end of 2019. The book is the successor to his 2011 photobook “Mushrooms from the Forest,” for which Homma visited forests in Fukushima in September and October of that year to photograph the mushrooms that grow there.

 

Takashi Homma:
When the disaster in Tohoku and Fukushima happened, I asked myself what I could do, as someone living in Tokyo. I had no intention of visiting the region to photograph the destruction. But I had already been photographing mushrooms. I figured that I could photograph mushrooms that were contaminated by the radiation.

 

―― Fukushima Prefecture issued an ordinance that forbid gathering mushrooms in Fukushima’s forests, as mushrooms absorb radioactivity very well. The mushrooms in Homma’s photographs may look ordinary, but they have all been affected by radioactivity.
For the exhibition at blind gallery [currently closed], we invited Kotaro Iizawa and mycologist Toshimitsu Fukihara for a discussion with Takashi Homma. Today is the first time since then that the two of you have the opportunity to speak with each other. We look forward to hearing you talk about the series, from the first photobook to this most recent one.

 

Kotaro Iizawa:
I’m glad that you continued photographing mushrooms in Fukushima’s forests. Can you tell me a little about that?

TH:
I continued taking photographs and published my works – mushrooms in Fukushima three years later – in a magazine overseas. I thought, if I’m already concerning myself with radiation this much, then I have to visit Chernobyl as well.
Also, I have always been interested in music, so John Cage came to enter the picture as well. He is famous for compositions like 4 minutes 33 seconds, but he was also a successful mycologist and even a founding member of the North American Mycological Association. He lived in a placed called Stony Point for many years, a forest about an hour away from Manhattan, where he studied mushrooms. There was a connection to his music, too.

KI:
That is where he discovered his love for mushrooms, isn’t it? Cage wrote brilliantly about mushrooms. Stony Point is somewhat of a holy site for me. I would love to visit it one day. You also went to Scandinavia for this series, didn’t you?

TH:
I had already taken photographs there before the disaster in Fukushima happened. Scandinavia has about as many different kinds of mushroom as Japan. They have a special role there, almost like they’re a part of the lives of the people living there.
By the way, they tried to cover up the accident in Chernobyl at first, but when Sweden recorded extraordinarily high levels of radioactivity, they were forced to admit to the accident. It was the wind. When the disaster in Fukushima happened, the wind was blowing north-northwest. And Sweden is located north-northwest of Chernobyl. It’s because of synchronicities like these that I wanted to visit these four places for the series.

KI:
Fukushima, Scandinavia, Chernobyl, Stony Point – that is the order in which they appear in the photobook, yes?
Did you shoot everything the same way as in Fukushima?

TH:
Yes, I kept the exact same pattern. With mushrooms, it is important not to move them even one bit. You have to shoot them right where you find them. So, I carried white sheets of paper with me and photographed the mushrooms on the spot, without additional lighting.

KI:
There are many different kinds of mushroom photographs but I have rarely ever seen other works that pursue this approach. The soil and the mushroom’s mycelium remain exactly as they are.

TH:
I had been interested in photographing mushrooms before the disaster had happened, and I had already experimented a lot with how to capture them in photographs. Actually, the mushroom’s true body is a system of roots hidden underground.

KI:
Yes, it is called the mycelium. You can think of it as a mass of long, thing cells that crawl through the ground. At their heart, forests are filled with networks of mushrooms.

TH:
I thought that I couldn’t call them photographs of mushrooms unless I include the mycelium as well. That’s why I decided to take this approach.

KI:
There is a sense of excitement, wonder and joy when you discover a mushroom, isn’t there? You would dilute these sensations if you dug out the mushrooms to photograph them elsewhere, which is why it is so important to take photographs on the spot.

TH:
They are very photogenic to me. It feels like shooting street snaps to me – mountain snaps, I guess. It’s difficult to come across such a large amount of them, though. A while ago, an acquaintance of mine from Dazaifu contacted me, “there are lots of interesting mushrooms growing in the mountains here!” I told him that I’ll be on my way, but when I arrived two days later, there were no mushrooms anywhere. Rainfall had swept them all away the previous day.

KI:
Yes, that is true. You go into the forest expecting to find mushrooms, but when you arrive they’re already gone. Looking at the pictures, I thought that it must have been difficult to photograph them. But I was also jealous – I wanted to see them myself, too!
Why did you become interested in mushrooms in the first place?

TH:
My work tends to be labeled conceptional and “strategically photographed,” but in truth there is a degree of intuition involved. With mushrooms, too, there is no particular reason why I find them interesting.
When Russian literature scholar Mitsuyoshi Numano published a new Chekhov translation, he said in an interview with a literature magazine, “if Tolstoy or Dostoyevski are large trees, then Chekhov is a mushroom.” When I read that passage, I thought to myself, “yes, that must be why I like mushrooms.” In the end, I’m more into people like Chekhov, or to say it in terms of Japanese literature, I’m more interested in Hyakken Uchida than Natsume Soseki or Mori Ogai.

KI
The smaller writers rather than the classic, top-tier authors?

TH:
Yes, right. Or more to the point, people like Nobuyoshi Araki – although he is definitely a top-tier artist now; there’s this certain sophistication that is typical of Tokyoites, this averseness to doing anything embarrassing. I think that’s what I find interesting about him.

KI:
Yes, I know what you mean. Since I began researching mushroom literature about 20 years ago, the way I look at things has changed. My base criteria for judging anything has become, “is it mushroom-like or not?” That is a very sloppy definition, of course. It isn’t quite that dichotomic, but I really do feel attached to anything that seems mushroom-like to me.
At the moment I’m introduced either as a photography critic or as a mushroom literature critic–slash–researcher, but in the future I’d like to combine them. When you or I regard photographs, we tend to do so in frames like photographic history or conceptuality, but photography is home to many more parts that do not fit into such categories. I’m thankful and happy for occasions like this, as I’d like to approach art and photography in a Chekhovian way in the future.
But let’s go back a little. I would like to hear more from you about Stony Point, and John Cage.

TH:
Much of the music we have today is songs that are easy to understand. That is what music means to many people. But I’ve always gravitated towards music that is unlike that, and that is a preference that will inevitably lead you towards John Cage. I’m also fascinated by his reclusive attitude. With the world as it is today, I think it is very important to have a way of life or an attitude or an orientation that is similar to that of the mushrooms, or to that of John Cage. Otherwise everything ends up being easy to understand and conservative.

KI:
Yes, I know what you mean. Closing yourself off, I guess.

TH:
I don’t think it’s limited to photography anymore either. I believe it extends to society and politics and everything else. It may be in vain but I do wish a little of John Cage would keep echoing on in people’s ears.

KI:
He had a relaxed, free way of thinking – not just in music, but in other fields as well. It branched out in diverse directions, like a mushroom’s mycelium, instead of sticking to fixed, logical paths. It was inevitable for him to become interested in mushrooms. There’s a beautiful wit in his works, too. There’s the brilliant “Mushroom Book” from 1972, for example, which combines John Cage’s poetic words with illustrations made by a mycologist. There’s a palpable love for mushrooms in the book. It’s almost a bit too much. To me, it is very important that you captured Stony Point as part of this series.
What kind of place was it? How was its atmosphere?

TH:
The town closest to Stony Point was actually quite conservative. There’s a military base there, and the Geiger counter showed rather high readings. I was guided to the area where John Cage picked his mushrooms and took photographs there. I wasn’t able to photograph enough mushrooms and went back again the next year. It is not easy at all to photograph mushrooms. It’s hard to come across them when they are truly fresh. Actually, I only created a relatively low number of works in Stony Point and Chernobyl because of my short stays there.

KI
Did you take the most in Fukushima?

TH:
Yes, and then Scandinavia, where I went for three separate seasons.

KI:
That is another place I would really like to visit. There are spots where mushrooms grow like flowers blooming in a garden.

TH:
Yes, they grow in carpets of moss in Scandinavia, like a picture book. I’ve never seen anything like that before. Like a stone circle...

KI:
A fairy ring, yes. In Japanese it’s called kin-rin [lit. “mushroom ring”]. A mushroom’s mycelium grows in a radial pattern around the sclerotium, a hardened mass of mycelium. And because the mushrooms grow at the tips of these mycelia, they sprout up in the form of a circle. Fairy rings have been described in literature from about the time of Shakespeare. Mushrooms are symbols of magic, and it was believed that something special would happen if you stepped inside a fairy ring.
By the way, did you find mushrooms interesting as a photographic subject? There are many works that convey the joy of photographing a given subject. What is your impression in comparison with other subjects?

TH:
As I mentioned earlier, I choose subjects and take photographs intuitively. You mentioned that there are many different types of mushroom photographs. Actually, there are hardly any serious, famous works. I think there’s one by Paul Strand, right?

KI:
August Sander and Edward Weston have also taken photographs of mushrooms. But they did so in a clean form, yes. There are almost no photographs like yours.

TH:
Karl Blossfeldt didn’t take any like them, either. I think it’s because of how difficult it is to carry them all the way to a studio. In that regard, I think it’s also really good in the context of photographic history.

KI:
Will you develop the series further?

TH:
If the mushrooms call out to me then I will answer and go take photographs of them. And I think they’ll call out to me very soon. [laughing]

 

(Text: Takiko Nishiki, Translation: Robert Zetzsche)